Acquired in Paris by the family of the present owner circa 1950

Executed on cream wove paper, laid down on canvas. There are several lines of surface rubbing at the extreme edges, especially to the lower edge, probably a result of frame rubbing. Other than light surface scratches near the lower left and upper right corners and some general time staining, this work is in good condition.
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Picasso's portraits of Dora Maar, a talented artist and photographer closely associated with the Surrealist movement, are amongst the most penetrating images of his entire œuvre. Balanced on the edge of Surrealist representation, they tread the fine line between naturalism and abstraction to depict a high level of psychological drama between artist and model.

Picasso met Dora Maar in 1936, and although he was still married to Olga Kokhlova and having an illicit affair with Marie-Thérèse Walter, he began an intense relationship with her: her image soon appeared in the artist's work, and over the next eight years she became his lover, companion and principal muse. Mature and intelligent, Dora Maar's highly emotional character occasioned some of Picasso's most intensely felt images, almost overpowering at times, but always redeemed by technical bravura.

Dora Maar had charmed Picasso with her fluent Spanish and her austere beauty, but more than anything else it was her face that obsessed the artist. Her most striking features, powerfully rendered in the present composition, were her thick mantle of rich black hair, which she kept long for the artist, and her dazzling, soulful eyes, which she strongly accented by heavy mascara. Dora Maar aesthetically stimulated Picasso in a way that no other mistress ever managed, and her features caused him to invent his famed 'double portrait' device: in the present work Dora's mouth and chin are painted in profile, yet both eyes and nostrils are fully visible. Because it merges several concepts, the double profile is a fascinating development of Picasso's pictorial evolution, stemming from the circulating viewpoint he had used in his cubist works. The artist would continue to explore this technique in his portraits until 1943.

Brigitte Leal writes that the portraits of Dora Maar 'remain among the finest achievements of his art, at a time when he was engaged in a sort of third path, verging on Surrealist representation while rejecting strict representation and, naturally, abstraction [...]. There is no doubt that by signing these portraits, Picasso tolled the final bell for the reign of ideal beauty and opened the way for the aesthetic tyranny of a sort of terrible and tragic beauty, the fruit of our contemporary history' (Brigitte Leal, '' 'For charming Dora': Portraits of Dora Maar'', in Picasso and Portraiture (exhibition catalogue), The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1996, p. 385).


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FIG. 1, Pablo Picasso, Femme dans un fauteuil (Dora), 1941-42, oil on canvas, Kunstmuseum, Basel